Bold Antiqua (cca. 1940)

Painter, graphic artist, mosaicist. Between 1946-1951 he was a student of the Budapest College of Fine Arts. His masters were Róbert Berény, Géza Főnyi and Jenő Barcsay. He visited France, Italy, Bulgaria and Israel on study trips. Since 1964 he has been a member of the old Szentendre Artists' Association. Although he has made panel paintings and prints throughout his career, Hegyi is best known for his mosaics and stained glass windows. He reinterpreted mosaic art, which had previously been considered a monumental genre, and began to create mosaics on the scale of a tableau. His subject matter was extremely varied, inspired as much by natural phenomena, architectural masterpieces and memories of his travels abroad as by figures from sagas and poems.

Szentendre was an important stage in the development of Hegyi's art, where his constructive vision was honed in the summer months in the presence of his master, Jenő Barcsay. He exhibited his works from this period at the European School's exhibition "Sight and Vision" in the winter of 1948. 'I felt, even knew, that they were the future, that they represented the new, the revolutionary, the new. It was in the College library that I learned about Picasso, the French, Russian and German greats of modern art. It was then that I first saw Vajda drawings at Endré Bálint's. Vajda's visions are a shocking and authentic insight into the horrors of fascism, a poignantly perfect artistic representation of inhumanity [...] I think it was not only in my subjects and motifs, but in my embrace of artistic tradition, in my constant experimentation and search for something new, that I became a true Szentendre painter,' Hegyi said of this very important but brief period in his career. Hegyi does not mention that he was familiar with Vajda's photomontages of Paris in the 1930s, but he definitely used similar motives and influences to design the cover of The Truth About Katin (1945) and the collage Kövér Antiqua (now on view). The latter follows a constructivist image-editing approach and colour-palette (red-black-white). On the newspaper page, Japanese Prime Minister Tozso reports on Japanese military operations. Antiqua (or antiqua) is one of the earliest printed typefaces, with capital letters drawn from the ancient Roman capitals (majuscules), which were engraved in stone to match the chisel, and lowercase letters from the Carolingian minuscules drawn by Charlemagne in the 800s with a cut pen. The chisels are indicated by the triangular bases, the pen by the oblique initials i, j, n. The first printers in Italy used the handwriting of the Italians as a basis, and thus this antique typeface, or "italic" = its Italian counterpart, was born.